Imagination lingers fondly, as Mr. Hubert Bland once remarked, over the spectacle of Elinor standing in the middle of the stage, three-quarters face to the audience, and firing off those acute generalizations about people who are not vindictive. Shaw's cleverness has begun thus early to betray him; a number of the characters are smart, but quite unnatural. The “Literary Great-grandfather” of the present Shaw unerringly pointed out many of the weak spots of Society; but his fundamental Socialism, impatient of class distinctions and social barriers, leads him occasionally into crude caricature. The book's greatest fault lies, perhaps, in the fact that his characters employ, not the natural, ductile speech of to-day, but the stilted diction of Dumas and Scott.

Commonplace as is the characterization, Shaw's next novel, Love Among the Artists, is a tract—less a novel than a critical essay with a purpose, in narrative form. Shaw confesses that he wrote this book for the purpose of illustrating “the difference between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, or, at least, unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures.”

I have often wondered if it might not be possible for one who did not know Shaw personally to construct a quite credible biography by making a composite of the peculiarly Shavian types presented in his novels and plays. Without carrying the analogy to extremes, I think it mediately true that Shaw has one by one exhibited, in semi-autobiographic form, the distinguishing hall-marks of his individual and many-sided character. To what extent Owen Jack is a projection of the Shaw of this period, how graphically, if unconsciously, Shaw has revealed in this droll original his own ideals of music and his defence of a certain impudently exasperating assertiveness of manner in himself, is difficult to decide. Shaw insists that Jack is partly founded on Beethoven. And yet there is an undoubted resemblance between the real Irishman and the imagined Welshman who plays the Hyde of Jack to the Jekyll of Shaw. Like “C. di B.” and G. B. S., Jack is the first of the “privileged lunatics.” He scorns the pedantry of the schools, sneers at mechanical music of academic origin, jibes at “analytic criticism,” and fiercely denounces the antiquated views of the musical organizations of England, with their old fogeyism, their cowardice in the face of novelty, their dread of innovation, and their cringing subservience to obsolescent and outworn models. Like Shaw, Jack is always tolerant of sincerity, always sympathetic with true effort, unrestrainedly enthusiastic over any vital outpouring of the creative spirit; rebuking tyranny wherever he sees it, exposing falsehood whenever he hears it, eternally vigilant in exposing frauds and unmasking shams. And yet, with all his offensive brusqueness, fierce intolerance, and colossal self-sufficiency, gentle-hearted, compassionate, and, in the presence of beauty, deeply humble.

Shaw once called Love Among the Artists a novel with a purpose. Viewed from another standpoint, it is a collection of types, a study in temperaments. The author preaches the arrogance of genius as opposed to a false humility in the presence of great art works. The shallow artist, Adrian Herbert, “spends whole days in explaining to you what a man of genius is and feels, knowing neither the one nor the other”; Mary Sutherland never surpasses mediocrity as an artist because her knowledge is based upon hearsay instead of upon experience. She stands in sharp contrast to Madge Brailsford, who tersely puts her case to Mary—the case, one might say, of the whole book—“If you don't like your own pictures, depend upon it no one else will. I am going to be an actress because I think I can act. You are going to be a painter because you think you can't paint.” Mr. Huneker declares that Mary Sutherland, “lymphatically selfish and utterly unsympathetic,” is his prime favourite in the story. “Her taste in flaring colours, her feet, her habit of breathing heavily when aroused emotionally, her cowardices, her artistic failures, her eye-glasses, her treacly sentiment—what a study of the tribe artistic! And truly British withal.” The only other noteworthy figure in the book is the evasive, elusive Mademoiselle Szczympliça—a study searching in the closeness and delicacy of its observation. This charming and piquant Polish pianist, although emanating poetry and romance, has, as she puts it, the “soul commercial” within her. She cannot see why, even if she does love her husband, she should therefore dispense with her piano practice!

Unlike the classic model for a play, this novel has neither beginning, middle, nor ending; and yet it has many brilliantly executed scenes. Who could ever forget the street fight in Paris, the humorous “love-scene” between Madge Brailsford and Owen Jack, and the rehearsal, so acute in its satire—fitting companion-piece to the Wagner lecture in Cashel Byron's Profession?

It is noteworthy that Love Among the Artists heralds a favourite thesis of Shaw's—the natural antipathy between blood relations—a thesis expounded many years later by John Tanner in the rather leaden epigram “I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural basis in a natural repugnance.” Cashel Byron is always catching himself in the act of “shying” when his mother is around—she used to throw things at him when he was a boy! Blanche Sartorius is quite ready to hate her father at a moment's notice; no love is lost between Julia and Colonel Craven; Vivie Warren stands out determinedly against her mother's authority; and Frank, with nauseating levity, takes great delight in “jollying” his reprobate father upon the indiscretions of his youth. Phil and Dolly are breezily disrespectful of parental rule; and Anne uses her maudlin mother as an excuse to do just whatever she wants. The thesis is part of Shaw's stock-in-trade, and might be regarded as a mere comic motif, were it not for the “damnable iteration” of the thing. Adrian Herbert avows his positive dislike for his mother, because, as he affirms, their natures are antagonistic, their views of life and duty incompatible—because they have nothing in common. We must take Shaw's insistence upon incompatibility of temperament between blood-relations with a good many grains of salt. It is not even half true that every mother tries to defeat every cherished project of her sons “by sarcasms, by threats, and, failing these, by cajolery”; that everyone's childhood has been “embittered by the dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father”; that every man's wife soon ceases to care for him and that he soon tires of her; that every man's brother goes to law with him over the division of the family property; and that every man's son acts in studied defiance of his plans and wishes. These things are only true enough to be funny; just enough of them happen in real life to give Shaw's thesis a sort of comic plausibility. It is the phrases, “love is eternal,” and “blood is thicker than water,” rather than the facts themselves, which make the iconoclastic Shaw see red. I find some explanation of his view in pardonable revolt, as a dramatist, against that persistent superstition of French melodrama—the voix du sang. Some explanation of Shaw's views in the matter may possibly be found in the facts of his own personal experience; at any rate, he once said that the word education brought to his mind four successive schools where his parents got him out of the way for half a day. Indeed, his campaign against the modern system of education springs from his recently expressed disgust with educators for concealing the fact that “the real object of that system is to relieve parents from the insufferable company and anxious care of their children.” Continuing in the same strain, he says:

With gradual, yet unhalting steps, Shaw works his way to those startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully credible to the intellectuels and so bewilderingly exasperating to the Philistines. In Love Among the Artists, Madge Brailsford's open avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that the theory of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry is upon us. But quite the contrary course is taken in Cashel Byron's Profession, Shaw's next novel. Cashel Byron, the perfect pugilist, fights his way into the good graces of the “high-born” heiress, Lydia Carew, by the straight exhibition of his physical prowess. The whole book is conceived in such broadly satirical vein that it is impossible for me to accept it as anything except a boyishly irrepressible pasquinade. Fortunately, the “little bits of Socialism that were daubed in” here and there at first, were afterwards deleted; the current version is a novel, pure and simple, with no discoverable Socialistic thesis behind it. Shaw's explanation that the book was written as an offset to the “abominable vein of retaliatory violence” that runs all through the literature of the nineteenth century need not detain us here; Shaw has made out his own case with sufficiently paradoxical cleverness in the inevitable preface. He spends one-half of his time in explaining his actions during the other half; and it has even been unkindly hinted that each new book of his serves merely as an excuse for writing another preface. And it should be remembered that the preface to Cashel Byron's Profession was written some eighteen years later than was the book itself—ample time for Shaw to devise any excuse for representing his book as a deliberate challenge to British ideals. Suffice it to say that a comparison of Cashel Byron's Profession with Rodney Stone, for example, will make plain the distinction between the realism and the romance of pugilism. And while Byron's exhibitions of physical prowess are the most “howlingly funny” incidents in the book, it is nevertheless true that Shaw has done nothing to surround the “noble art of sluggerei” with any halo of fictitious romance.[28] “Its novelty,” as Shaw himself maintains, “consists in the fact that an attempt is made to treat the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the general elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist persists in associating it.”

The real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book consists rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat anything seriously. So far as the prize-ring is concerned, the book's realism is veracious; the rest is the frankest of popular melodrama. What appeals more strongly to the popular heart than a low-born but invincible slugger fighting his way, round after round, to the side of a noble and fabulously wealthy heroine! What more oracularly Adelphic in its melodrama than the “finger of fate” upon the “long arm of coincidence” directing Cashel's mother to the mansion of Miss Lydia Carew! And what an exquisite fulfilment of poetic justice—the ultimate discovery that Cashel is a scion of one of the oldest county families in England, and heir to a great estate! The thing that makes the book go, of course, is its peculiarly Shavian cast—the combination of what Stevenson called “struggling, overlaid original talent” and “blooming gaseous folly.” Shaw's sense of dramatic situation continually foreshadows the future playwright. The abounding humour of the exquisitely ludicrous scene at the reception—the devastating comicality of the brute, with his native “mother-wit,” turned rough-and-ready philosopher! When Cashel is set down in the midst of this ethical-artistic circle, he breezily excels all the professors—for he discusses art positively, in the terminology of his own profession, in which he is a past master. The sublime hardihood of elucidating Beethoven and Wagner in terms of the pugilistic art of Jack Randall! And Bashville, over whom Stevenson howled with derision and delight, what a brief for democratic Socialism is Bashville—prototype for the Admirable Crichton and 'Enry Straker—keenly conscious of his own absurdity, yet zealously standing out in defence of his mistress and in insistence upon the truly democratic doctrine of “equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” Who cannot sympathize with Stevenson: “I dote on Bashville—I could read of him for ever; de Bashville je suis le fervent—there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; Bashville est magnifique, mais il n'est guère possible.” Or when he says: “Bashville—O Bashville! j'en chortle (which is finely polyglot).” Service is as sacred to Bashville as pugilism is to Cashel. Each is the “ideal” professional man, who magnifies his office and measures up to the height of his own profession. Each demands recognition for fulfilling to the best of his ability his own special function in life. Shaw insists that the real worth of a man is not to be measured by the social standing of his profession, but in terms of his professional efficiency.

Shaw's mastery of the portrayal of striking contrasts is exhibited in the case of Cashel Byron and Lydia Carew. There is a strong hint of the “female Yahoo” in Lydia's avowal to her aristocratic suitor: “I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.” This was fun to Stevenson—but “horrid fun.” His postscript is laconically eloquent: “(I say, Archer, my God! what women!)” William Morris seems to have had the rights in the matter in describing Lydia, to Shaw privately, as a “prig-ess.” Shaw grandiloquently speaks of her as “superhuman all through,” a “working model” of an “improved type” of womanhood. “Let me not deny, however ...,” he remarks, “that a post-mortem examination by a capable critical anatomist—probably my biographer—will reveal the fact that her inside is full of wheels and springs.” The book closes on a mildly Shavian note—the romance has dwindled to banality. “Cashel's admiration for his wife survived the ardour of his first love for her; and her habitual forethought saved her from disappointing his reliance on her judgment.”

All that was needed to expose the threadbare plot of Cashel Byron's Profession was The Admirable Bashville: or Constancy Unrewarded—Shaw's blank-verse stage version of the novel. This delightful jest was perpetrated in defence of the stage-right of the novel, which threatened to pass into unworthy hands through the malign workings of that “foolish anomaly,” the English Copyright Law. In Shaw's celebrated lecture on Shakespeare, at Kensington Town Hall, section 10, as given in his abstract, reads as follows:

Liking the “melodious sing-song, the clear, simple, one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half-closes in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peele, Kid, Greene, and the histories of Shakespeare,” Shaw quite naturally “poetasted The Admirable Bashville in the rigmarole style.” After illustrating how unspeakably bad Shakespearean blank verse is, Shaw ludicrously claims that his own is “just as good.” Nor is it possible to deny that his own blank verse positively scintillates with the Shakespearean—or is it Shavian?—sense of its absurdity. The preface to The Admirable Bashville has the genuine Shavian timbre, with its solemn fooling, its portentous levity, its false premises and ludicrous conclusions. In that preface, as Mr. Archer puts it, Shaw “defends the woodenness of his blank verse by arguing that wooden blank verse is the best. That, at any rate, is the gist of his contention, though he does not put it in just that way.”

The play—for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing—is a truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bashville, but Cashel only is admirable; it is Cashel's constancy that is rewarded. The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious extravagance—a hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot resist the temptation to quote from the scene in which Lydia, Lucian, and Bashville, fast locked against intrusion, debate the question of admitting Cashel, the presumably infuriated ruffian, who has just been successfully tripped up by Bashville as he is trying to enter the Carew mansion.

Lydia:We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.

Lucian:Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike you were against his code of honour;
But me, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.

Bashville: Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I'll take him on
Here—now—at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.

Lucian:Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.

And well worth remembering is the naïve autobiography, delivered at the request of the Zulu king, of that celestially denominated “bruiser” concerning whom Cashel once said: “Slave to the ring I rest until the face of Paradise be changed.”

Cetewayo: Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.

Paradise:Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson's “Blue Anchor” pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.

Those who witnessed the original production of the play by the London Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production in 1909 at the “Afternoon Theatre” (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly gave it that “huge applause” of which Shaw speaks so frankly. “The best burlesque of rhetorical drama in the language,” is Mr. Archer's sweeping dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines might find it easy to agree with his statement: “Fielding's 'Tom Thumb' and Carey's 'Chrononhotonthologos' are, it seems to me, not in the running.”

Not until the appearance of An Unsocial Socialist, fifth of the novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories opened. There now begin to troop forth those startling and anarchic views with which the name of Shaw is popularly associated. This modern “École des Maris” heralds the reign of the “literature of effrontery”; Shaw is beginning to take his stride. With all its extravagance and waywardness, An Unsocial Socialist has been declared by at least one critic of authority to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith ever wrote. Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw: “Let him beware of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch.” Gone are the chivalry and romance—the winds of Socialism have blown them all away. But the book fairly reeks of the “damned century,” with its mad irresponsibility, its exasperating levity, its religious and social revolt. Written in 1883, it seethes and bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew just then beginning to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us, was to “produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the whole social problem.... When I had finished two chapters of this enterprise—chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest preliminary matter—I broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity.” Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's magnum opus were published as a complete novel, in two “books,” under the title An Unsocial Socialist. Shaw begins fiercely to sermonize humanity, to deride all customs and institutions which have not their roots sunk in individualism and in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins are: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion to woman, romance. Sidney Trefusis is the philosopher of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some schemes for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage to him, as to Tanner, means “apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul, violation of his manhood, sale of his birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat,” Trefusis deliberately deserts his wife, not because, as with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's Love's Comedy, love seems too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to the illusion-shattering test of marriage, but because marriage involves the triumph of senses over sense, of passion over reason. Even after he has ceased to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in motion the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that she is satisfied so long as “the wheels go round.”

The millionaire son of a captain of industry, Trefusis has, by a strange freak of fate, drunk deep of the Socialist draught of the epoch. Respecting his dead father for his energy and bravery among unscrupulous competitors in the struggle for existence, Trefusis curses his memory for the inhuman means employed in his business dealings and the social crimes concealed by the shimmer of his “ill-gotten gold.”

His most significant utterance—an outburst before the wealthy landowner, Sir Charles Brandon—gives us a clear picture of Shaw's Socialist views at this time:

A Marx in Shaw's clothing, Trefusis devotes all his energies, all his wealth, to the task of forming an international association—“The International,” history gives it—of men pledged “to share the world's work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing—charity apart—to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share of work.” Whole-souledly committed to Socialism in its iconoclastic aspects, Trefusis defies convention, prudery, delicacy, good-taste, and tact in all his actions, convinced beyond reclaim that “vile or not, whatever is true is to the purpose.” His philosophy holds it a short-sighted policy to run away from a mistake or a misunderstanding, instead of “facing the music” and clearing the matter up. A licensed eccentric like his prototypic creator in real life, Trefusis is permitted to take liberties granted to no one else; and by the “exercise of a certain considerate tact (which, on the outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact),” but which in reality consists in the most ingenious double-dealing, he somehow or other contrives to have his way and go scot-free.

In the early part of the story, disguised as that “terrific combination of nerves, gall, and brains,” Smilash, he dexterously philanders to his heart's content with several young girls at the boarding-school where his wife was educated. The verisimilitude of the portraits, the acute psychology exhibited in the portrayal of the feelings, sentiments, and sentimentalities of young girls in the boarding-school stage of evolution, testify to Shaw's remarkable gifts as a genuine realist. That forerunner of Julia Craven, the romantic little Henrietta Jansenius, is portrayed with insight, and not without delicacy and restraint. The most unreal, most unhuman scene in the book is that in which Trefusis apostrophizes the body of his dead wife. His reflections impress me as both flippant and callous in their solemn setting. It is with a sense of profound shock that we hear him rudely flout the “funereal sanctimoniousness” of the family physician, mock at the “harrowing mummeries” of religious and social observance, and “damn the feelings” of a father and mother who regarded their daughter as their chattel and showed no true feeling for her when she was alive. Trefusis is devoured with the conviction that the first, if the hardest, of all duties is one's duty to one's self. His fine Italian hand is betrayed in his later philanderings with the whilom loves of Smilash, now grown up into disagreeable, hard, calculating women. Trefusis's trickery of Sir Charles Brandon, his unfeeling deception of Gertrude Lindsay, his base flattery of Lady Brandon, his misleading promise to Erskine, are all exhibitions of his Jesuitical policy. The exponent of Socialism and the New Morality, Trefusis has no scruples in employing unfair means to secure whatsoever he wants—for the cause of labour and for himself.[30]